When Despair Descends (2)
A magical girl’s power lightly exceeds any ordinary human standard.
An ordinary person could never hope to stand against a magical girl. To put it with only a little exaggeration, a single one of them could erase a small nation from the map.
However small and fragile she might look, she could still bring to bear the strength of hundreds—even thousands—of grown men. That was the overwhelming power granted to a magical girl.
Ether energy.
An outside force that only a chosen few could sense, and the wellspring of every ability a magical girl could wield.
They kept Gamma Ether wrapped around their bodies at all times. As a fledgling instinctively beat its wings, so magical girls instinctively sheathed themselves in it.
Their halted aging, their stalled growth—all of it owed to that same sheath.
Like a thick cocoon shielding the insect within, the transparent membrane of ether spread over a magical girl’s body protected her from conventional weapons: bullets, missiles, the whole arsenal of ordinary war.
Human armaments could not kill them. A magical girl only fell if she chose death herself, if an Unknown destroyed her, or if a nuclear weapon reduced an entire district to ash and left her barely neutralized.
That was why humanity feared them so fiercely.
If a being no attack could touch—a being who stood so far beyond human capacity—ever turned against the order of people, no one could stop her. No one except another magical girl.
And magical girls went mad by degrees.
It was the result of the same “ether energy” that powered them accumulating past safe limits inside their bodies.
The more they used their Remegeton, the more ether energy stacked up within them.
That energy struck the brain and spinal cord directly. It made them hunger for more Gamma Ether; it loosened every bond of morality and value.
Emotion by emotion, it hollowed them out until they became puppets of the ether itself.
And the moment they crossed the threshold, the ether energy stored inside erupted outward like a volcano.
That was a magical girl’s rampage. Stripped of reason and drowned in Madness, they reduced everything in sight to cinders. Humanity had already lived through more of those rampages than anyone cared to count.
Time bombs that could go off at any moment.
That was the conclusion reached by the magical-girl oversight bodies in every region when they resolved to purge their numbers past a certain point.
And the Magical Girl of Illusion, Harsa, fell inside that category as well.
Illusion knew. She knew the Bureau meant to purge her. She knew Ian-na sat at the center of it. She knew that if she stayed still, she would be struck first.
Of course, that was wrong. Among the Bureau’s targets for purge, Illusion—one of the twelve seats—was not included. Her performance was precise enough to deceive even the Bureau’s upper ranks. No one knew she had already begun to crack.
She even passed the regular brain-wave examinations without a hitch. Illusion managed herself with ruthless care, venting only a carefully limited sadism to keep her appetites satisfied.
As she was doing now.
Fragmented scraps of information assembled themselves inside Illusion’s mind. Ian-na was leading the magical-girl purge. Recently she had even manufactured Unknowns and used them to butcher an artificial girl who had once been her friend.
Illusion thought it through.
If she left Ian-na alive, the very existence of magical girls—herself included—would be put in danger.
At the very least… at the absolute least… she could have surrendered her own life.
But not the others.
Not Scales. Not the other magical girls.
She would not watch the precious comrades who had fought back-to-back with her die. She wanted to protect them no matter what stigma she had to wear—even if it meant turning her back on the Bureau.
Of course, that too was only speculation. It was never the truth. Ian-na did not stand at the center of any purge the way Illusion imagined. She was the Bureau’s rubber stamp, its doll, its puppet, its scapegoat—without a scrap of real authority.
…I’ll kill Ian-na for certain. Make her pay for everything.
That was what Illusion was thinking now.
A calm mind would have seen the contradictions packed into her reasoning, but Illusion was running hot.
A fellow magical girl’s death. Being driven to the brink in her first battle against an Unknown. Being knocked down so easily when she had believed herself the strongest. Waking from a long sleep to find her skin dry and rough. Being chewed over by swarms of mosquitoes in a swamp. And countless other irritations besides.
In short, Illusion was taking it out on someone—and dressing the act up as justice.
The senior magical girl she had once respected—the one who would throw away her own life for the others, who stood against injustice to shield the weak and topple the strong—was ruined now.
To keep her own skin, she had sold her comrades to the Bureau. She had spread her legs in humiliation and simpered, reduced to the Bureau’s whore.
It was unforgivable. Another magical girl, perhaps—but the Magical Girl of the Waning Moon, Ian-na, behaving like this was a contradiction too deep against everything she had ever done or said.
“Keh—kehck… l-let… let go…”
Ian-na’s thrashing figure entered her field of view, suspended in the air.
She was drooling, and she had wet herself.
That posture only poured fuel on Illusion’s sadism.
If she chose—if she truly decided to kill—she could erase Ian-na at a speed the woman would never even register.
She could wipe the existence of this Ian-na, who squirmed so uglily for her life, clean out of the world. The power Illusion held made that possible. She could scrub away every trace that Ian-na had ever lived.
If she thought of the thin, lingering respect for Ian-na that still remained somewhere in her heart, that would have been the right thing.
Once, Ian-na had been the summit of every magical girl, Illusion’s only light, the idol she had longed for, the guardian of the weak. Illusion did not want that figure to meet an ugly end.
She could have annihilated Ian-na in an instant, so thoroughly she would not even feel the pain.
She could have. And yet—
But that wouldn’t be any fun…
What Illusion sought was nothing so dull.
The harder Ian-na struggled, the more something seemed to fill the hollow place inside her.
A kind of conquest.
She wanted to make Ian-na beg for her life. She wanted to grind her idol thoroughly underfoot and keep her there. She felt a little sorry toward the dead Oksana for thinking it, but more than revenge for Ian-na, Illusion was taking a greater pleasure in playing with a writhing worm.
The longer she watched Ian-na thrash, the more she pressed her fist against that white stomach still marked with surgical scars, the more a satisfaction she had never felt before rose through her.
Her whole body shivered with elation. The excitement was so hard to contain that her cheeks flushed red.
Without quite realizing it, Illusion was smiling as she looked at Ian-na.
Broadly. Completely.
With a smile that looked ready to split the corners of her mouth, she watched Ian-na tremble.
Just a little.
If she went just a little further—
she felt she might understand something.
Just a little… further…
“…You’re smiling.”
Scales, who had been holding Ian-na’s body tight, spoke quietly.
That single, clear line from Scales.
Illusion barely dragged her mind back into place and, in a single stroke, crushed down the ether energy that had begun to run wild inside her.
Then she slowly recognized what she was doing.
She had been stroking her fist down Ian-na’s white stomach. Quietly considering which spot would be softest, where to drive it in so that Ian-na would suffer the most.
“One.”
And Illusion drove her fist into the lower part of Ian-na’s abdomen—by her own clear will.
“Keh—kehuck…”
Ian-na’s eyes rolled back; she convulsed. Blood-streaked stomach acid sprayed out. It felt rather like crushing a frog underfoot.
Left like this, Ian-na would die. A single punch had put her on the edge of death.
But—
“Two.”
Thud!
Ian-na did not die. Illusion drove a fist sheathed in ether into her abdomen.
A sound large enough to fill the whole of Ian-na’s room rang out.
Ian-na twisted and thrashed. Consciousness was already gone; only the survival instinct remained, straining with everything it had to escape Scales’s and Illusion’s grip.
Again—left like this, she would die.
Just as she had after the first blow, Illusion restored Ian-na’s body with her power.
More precisely, she turned the near-dead state of Ian-na into an Illusion.
If Ian-na died, she could not pay the full price. Illusion had to regulate her so she would not die and hit her sixty-eight times. The conditions were fairly exacting, but for Illusion it was familiar work.
She had repeated it countless times already.
Ian-na twisted her whole body and wet herself again.
She felt, with brutal clarity, the sensation of her burst organs regenerating under Illusion’s fist. The moment Illusion activated her power, Ian-na came back to herself.
Tears were running from both of Ian-na’s eyes. She looked straight at Illusion with an expression that asked, Why?
And then, for the first time in her life, she began to be afraid of a magical girl.